Tech czar remains low-profile

Jon Stewart calls him the Indian George Clooney. He counts Democratic National Committee Chairman and former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine as one of his job references. And President Barack Obama has tasked him with finding ways for technology to advance his priorities.

Yet Aneesh Chopra, the nation’s first chief technology officer, or tech czar, has been so low profile in Washington’s usual power corridors that it’s almost as though he’s the first virtual czar.

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He’s not, of course, and the reality can be a bit startling, especially when the 37-year-old’s unorthodox style and bountiful energy is housed inside a White House that aspires to being steadfast and a little boring.

On a recent Friday morning, Chopra’s working the crowd at a FIRST Robotics high school competition, trading business cards with everyone he meets. “Hey! Great speech this morning!” he says as he passes a student who spoke at a breakfast earlier that morning. “Hey listen, I just wanna give you my card. You’ve gotta e-mail me. I wanna follow you.”

When someone else taps on his shoulder: “I’m all ears. I’m excited.”

As he walks toward the platform where he’s set to deliver remarks, he breaks into a brief dance — hands in fists, elbows bent — to Jay-Z’s “Run This Town.”

In his speech, Chopra plugs the White House blog and tells the youthful competitors that “unlike hoops, in this sport, every single one of you can turn pro.”

“Ready to rock and roll?” he said afterward, putting on safety goggles to tour the competition. “How cool is this?”

On “The Daily Show” in December, Stewart poked fun at Chopra after showing a clip of the tech czar cracking up during a webcast about Obama’s Open Government Directive.

Asked about the unexpected attention, Chopra explained, with all seriousness: “You know, I was so excited about the announcement of the Open Government Directive that I found myself caught up in the moment. I found myself in a bit of an awkward place.” The Stewart jab aired before millions was “a modest price to pay for the attention to the plan,” he added.

Chopra’s unconventional persona is also reflected in his office.

Situated on the fifth floor in an office building around the corner from the White House, his space has nothing in it but a desk with a phone and a computer, a couple of chairs and a trash can.

The walls are bare, and there are no pictures of his wife, two small children or the president in a classic grip-and-grin that is a decorative mainstay for government appointees.

Still, amid all that austerity, there stand piles of paper — documents with handwritten notes in the margins, binders, business cards, a credit-card statement and receipts — covering nearly every inch of his desk.

“Each pile has a particular category of responsibility and priority,” he explained. He holds up one that deals with a Defense Department initiative. Another is topped with the NASA Office of Education Weekly Activity Report Tool.

That’s not to say the tech czar doesn’t use technology, but he needed to do some upgrading when he first arrived.

On his first day on the job, Chopra said that when he walked into his office, he found a desktop computer with Internet Explorer 6, a version notorious for security problems, which was so subpar he couldn’t even search documents on it.

“I joked that it was easier to pull up a Web page on my iPhone than it was to call up a Web page on my desktop,” he said.